Pendleton Makes Return -- In Playwright's Role

Austin Pendleton Takes Up Role Of Playwright

August 21, 1991|By FRANK RIZZO; Courant Staff Writer

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. -- Austin Pendleton offers a sweet, crooked smile as he greets well-wishers arriving to see "Booth Is Back" at the Other Stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival last week. It's difficult to tell if Pendleton is nervous about the premiere of the work, which marks his debut as a playwright.

After all, his countenance is naturally and charmingly off center, full of idiosyncratic tics, glances and giggles. His flyaway hair resembles that of a man suddenly awakened from sleep; his clothes look as if they were randomly picked in the dark.

But under the exterior of an American eccentric is the mind of a serious artist who first began as an actor, then expanded his craft to become a first-class director and is now daring to be a playwright as well.

Over Cream of Wheat and cranberry juice the morning after the play's opening, the 51-year-old Pendleton confesses he wasn't nervous at all about the world premiere. His first play will transfer to Williamstown's main stage after the workshop run beginning tonight and then will travel to New Haven, where it will open the season at Long Wharf Theatre at the end of September.

"I don't know why," he says in a voice that is both breathless and relaxed. "I get fatalistic, I guess. If the audience had rejected the play last night, I would have thought, `Well then, that's what happens.' "

But the audience applauded the three-act play, which focuses on the father-son relationship of the 19th century American actors Junius and Edwin Booth. (Edwin's younger brother and future presidential assassin, John Wilkes Booth, is a peripheral character.)

Junius Booth is played by Frank Langella. Also in the cast, directed by Long Wharf artistic director Arvin Brown, is Raphael Sbarge as Edwin, Maureen Anderman, Beth Dixon, Joyce Ebert, Ralph Williams, Bob Morrisey, Isabel Rose and Alexander Enberg. Sets are by John Lee Beatty. "Booth Is Back" goes back to Pendleton's days as an undergraduate at Yale in the late '50s, when a fellow student wanted to create a musical for the Dramat that would encompass 19th century America.

"I asked him what part of the country he wanted to write about, and he said, `All over.' "

Pendleton remembered a biography of Edwin Booth, the pre-eminent actor of the mid-19th century who had traveled around the country performing. But ST in researching the work, Pendleton became fascinated with his father, Junius Booth, a stylized, declamatory actor of the "old school' -- and the conflicts between father and son.

Over the years, the musical was reworked several times, including a staging at Williamstown and a workshop at New York's Lincoln Center, "but it just never worked out."

Last year, Pendleton began to rethink the work as a play.

"This is really a whole new piece," he says. "It's not just a musical with the songs taken out. I just started all over again."

This was not Pendleton's first attempt at writing, having created librettos for a series of less-than-successful musicals.

"So writing wasn't that outrageous a leap for me," he says. The difference, he says, was "I just had to write this."

Part of the compulsion had to do with the powerful character of Junius Booth. "[Junius's] acting style was not realistic truth," says Pendleton, "but I think on its own terms it was probably valid and very electric. It's a style that doesn't exist anymore, but it had a real necessity for the pioneer era that was ending. With all these people out there in the wilderness, you had to connect with them in this elemental way."

The elder Booth also believed that actors must pay a personal price to achieve truth in the characters they play, "and I identified with that," says Pendleton. "[Junius] thinks he has to drink in order to do it. But I believe in some way you do have to alter yourself somewhat, and that's very painful and frightening. I think if it was just about acting, it would not be that interesting to an audience."

In a way, that power of transformation was one of the reasons why Pendleton became an actor.

The son of an executive of a tool company in Warren, Ohio, Pendleton became interested in professional make-believe when his mother began a community theater in the family living room after World War II.

"I was 6, and I thought it was just magical," he says. "I knew I wanted to become an actor, although it was all very unlikely. I was this funny-looking kid, so scrawny and maladroit, and I couldn't speak very well."

But Pendleton persevered, often passing on parts that would be too easy for him to do.

"Particularly in the theater, I won't do a part unless it contains some challenge, some very real possibility that I won't be able to do it at all. Sometimes I've gotten into real trouble that way in my career."